Amazon Drive: Cloud storage service to be discontinued at the end of 2023

Amazon is discontinuing its own cloud storage service Amazon Drive. The service will be taken offline by the end of 2023, but storage for photos and videos will continue.

Amazon Drive will be discontinued by the end of 2023

The company wants to take the opportunity to fully focus on its Amazon Photos efforts, according to the FAQ on the discontinuation of Amazon Drive on the Internet giant’s site. What is clear is that Amazon Drive will be discontinued on December 31, 2023. Then it will no longer be possible to upload documents and other files apart from photos and videos to the provider’s cloud.

The service was officially launched in March 2011 and had positioned itself on the market as an alternative to well-known services such as Dropbox, Onedrive and others. So now, some eleven years later, it’s over.

Since the launch, Amazon had repeatedly cut the services of the cloud storage solution. In 2015, there was still unlimited storage for $60 a year. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime members get 5GB of storage for videos, music, documents and other files, as well as unlimited storage for photos.

Farewell as early as January 2023

As it is further said on the part of Amazon, however, it should no longer be possible to upload files to Amazon Drive as early as January 31, 2023. On October 31, 2023, the corresponding app will then be removed from the stores for iOS and Android, but until the end of the year, content should still be able to be viewed and downloaded.

Photos and videos will not be affected, however, because they will remain in Amazon Photos. This cloud storage is also expected to remain in place. Before the files are deleted from Drive, Amazon wants to inform customers in good time and allow enough time to download the content. Those interested in expanding their storage in Amazon Drive will already notice that a redirect to the Photos service will take place.

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What does Amazon Drive cost?

Amazon currently offers a variety of subscriptions for its cloud storage, with videos in mind. It starts with 100 GB of storage space, added 1 TB to a maximum of 30 TB, but only subscriptions up to a maximum of 2 TB can be paid monthly.

100 GB with Amazon Photos costs 1.99 euros per month, 1 TB is available for 9.99 euros per month and 2 TB costs 19.99 euros per month. Annual payments, on the other hand, save 16 percent. 20 TB of data costs a hefty 1,999.80 euros per year, and 30 TB costs around 1,000 euros more.

By way of comparison, Google Drive also starts at €19.99 per year for 100 GB of storage space. At €249.99 per year, 5 TB costs only half as much as Amazon (€499.95). Dropbox starts at 9.99 euros per month for 2,000 GB of data with annual billing, or 11.99 euros with monthly payment. Five terabytes only cost 144 Euros per year.